Crimson Forest - Lisa Howarth thelonelypixel.etsy.comI read The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy last year, a novel about Nazi-occupied Poland, and of all the books I read in 2010, this is the book that still has me in its grip. Murphy takes the classic fairytale and revisits the nature of evil, stepmother and witch stereotypes, the bleak and devasting period of our shared history. If a story about the Holocaust can be hopeful or have a semi-happy ending, this is it.
From Publishers Weekly:
A provocative transformation of the classic fairy tale into a haunting survival story set in Poland during WWII, Murphy's second novel (after The Sea Within) is darkly enchanting. Two Jewish children, a girl of 11 and her seven-year-old brother, are left to wander the woods after their father and stepmother are forced to abandon them, frantically begging them never to say their Jewish names, but to identify themselves as Hansel and Gretel. In an imaginative reversal of the original tale, they encounter a small woman named Magda, known as a "witch" by villagers, who risks her life in harboring them. The story alternates between the children's nightmarish adventures, and their parents' struggle for survival and hope for a safe reunion. This mirror image of the fairy tale is deliberately disorienting, as Murphy describes the horrors of the outside world compared with the haven inside Magda's hut, and the fear and anguish of the other people who conspire to save the children and protect their own families, too. The na‹ve siblings are only half-conscious of much of this, though they are perfectly aware of their peril should they be discovered. The graphic details-the physical symptoms of near starvation, the infestations of lice, the effects of bitter cold-make it plain that this is the grimmest kind of fable. Eventually, the Nazis indulge in wholesale slaughter, and the children barely survive, hiding and on the run. No reader who picks up this inspiring novel will put it down until the final pages, in which redemption is not a fairy tale ending but a heartening message of hope.
Lisa Howarth's photograph had such a visceral effect I immediately thought of Murphy's brutal revisioning of the fairytale. The blood red forest floor is a compelling visual metaphor for the Nazi's depravity.
The witnesses of the Holocaust are dying off now and with them they take their stories. Murphy's book makes us face our past, and what we are capable of, both good and evil.
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